Zotac 7300 GT DDR3 128Mb

Our third budget entry is a card based on newer 7300 GT core with DDR3 memory, one of the brands selling these faster 7 series breeds is Zotac. We recently started a VGA overclocking contest with these cards, and decided to include its performance results in this review.



The Zotac 7300 GT card has less memory, only 128Mb, but it’s DDR3 and clocked much higher at 750Mhz! The core is also running 150Mhz higher than the DDR2 7300 GT, it’s now up to 500Mhz.



Package contents are kept to a bare minimum, driver CD and S-Video out connector, nothing more. The PCB design of the Zotac 7300 GT is custom made, haven’t seen a card in this series this small yet. The heatsink is low profile but features an impressive array of aluminum fins and has a fast spinning fan to keep the core cool; overclocking with standard cooling was easy as the stock cooling kept the core quite cool.



The memory chips are Samsung K4J52324QC-BC12 and rated somewhere between 700-800Mhz (the exact BC12 model doesn’t appear on the Samsung data sheets, but the BC14 is rated at 700Mhz).



Time to find out if the new NVIDIA 8500 GT low budget card can improve on the 7300 GT’s price/performance balance ->